It's probably damning with
faint praise to say that Pearl Harbor may be the closest
thing to a good movie Michael Bay will ever direct; unfortunately,
it's still not very close to a good movie. A lot of observers
have been rooting for this big, $135 million, 183-minute baby
to fall flat on its diaper, asserting itself as the unquestionable,
contemptible bomb that will finally vanquish Bay's attention-deficit-disorder
style of filmmaking for good. Bay, however, has crafted a watchable
and sometimes even dumbly entertaining spectacle out of very
base material (the "script" is blamed on Braveheart's
Randall Wallace).

The question is whether an
epic about an American catastrophe should be dumbly entertaining.
Let's tackle the thing itself, up front: The December 7, 1941
sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which flares up more than an hour
into the film, contains some of the most seamless computer-generated
destruction effects you've ever seen. The many men and women
who toiled endlessly to deliver a convincing re-enactment of
the bombing deserve to take a bow. But underneath all this is
the callous sensibility of a director who frames it all as a
percussive fireworks bash out of Star Wars. Closer to
the mark, Pearl Harbor is really Independence
Day with historical credentials: "Aliens" attack;
America fights back.

The center of Pearl Harbor
is not the Hawaiian military base itself, but a romantic triangle.
Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, hot-shot fighter pilots and best
buddies since childhood, fall in love with the same woman, nurse
Kate Beckinsale. This, I suppose, is designed for people who
like their historical tragedy decorated with the doily of fictional
romance -- the same people who made Titanic
such a hit. But whereas James Cameron was able to persuade us
that the affair between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet was
in the stars and just happened to unfold aboard a doomed
cruise liner, Bay cannot hoodwink us into thinking that Beckinsale's
romantic anguish is anything other than demographically shrewd.

After Japan hits us hard, FDR
(Jon Voight, in makeup not quite as seamless as the computer
graphics) inspires his staff to achieve the impossible -- a retaliatory
strike on Tokyo -- by standing up out of his wheelchair on shaky
legs. I took that as a neat metaphor for the movie, which can
never quite stand on its own two feet. Everything in it is imported
from better (and sometimes equally bad) movies. When Beckinsale
wraps her hanky around Affleck's neck for good luck, I couldn't
help thinking I'd just seen the gesture in two other movies this
season, A
Knight's Tale and Shrek.
When Colonel James Doolittle makes countless speeches to beef
up his men's courage, Alec Baldwin is interchangeable with Bill
Pullman in Independence Day, rallying the troops with
tough-guy doggerel. Asked what the men should do if their planes
start going down over Tokyo, Doolittle says he would try
to crash into as much military stuff as possible on the way down.
"But," he adds hilariously and anachronistically, "that's
just me."

It's undoubtedly no accident
that Pearl Harbor arrives on Memorial Day weekend, traditionally
the launchpad for the summer's Big Movie but also supposedly
the time set aside to remember those who fell in battle. But
the movie's gung-ho heroic spirit disturbingly suggests, albeit
inadvertently, that the real heroes were those who survived;
those who died obviously didn't have the right stuff. This is
far from the truth, of course, since war claims the brave and
cowardly alike, but movies like Pearl Harbor, with its
broad-stroke Wagnerian approach to war and tragedy, hark back
to the hollow John Wayne combat pictures in which the conflict
was easily delineated and the heroes made it through with barely
a scratch (as well as a few sad losses for the audience to sniffle
over while knowing that anyone whose name appeared above the
title on the poster was safe from harm). To me, any movie that
tries to sell the audience on war as a proving ground for noble
men (and women) is no better than a recruitment poster for death,
and dishonors those who died at Pearl Harbor and every other
field of battle. But that's just me.